A Restless Wind Inside a Letter Box
by aikakone
Summary: On a night when he can't go home, Henry starts in a karaoke bar with Lucas, but he ends up in Central Park with Joanna Reece. Damned energy drinks and their mind altering properties.


"You've got to try this, Henry," Lucas said as he put a new Japanese energy drink in front of him.

Henry looked at it suspiciously. He had many beverages he enjoyed, but anything that called itself an energy drink was definitely not one of them. Before the other man's face could fall, he made a show of taking a sip.

"Tasty," he said, blandly to Lucas's great delight.

"Some of my film school friends gave me a case behind the bar. They made an indie in Japan," he enthused in that puppy dog way of his. "It will be the next _Ring_!"

Lucas stopped and wondered if Henry even knew what _The Ring_ was. Then he stared at Henry to urge him to take another sip of the drink. Satisfied that Dr. Morgan was finally hanging out with him, Lucas set about the task of picking out a song he wanted to sing for karaoke. A few pages into the book, he started mumbling a song to himself about broken dreams.

Jumping up confidently, Lucas said, "I'm going to do it! Don't go anywhere, Doc!"

Henry wondered just where he _could_ go even if he wanted to do so. Martinez and Hanson were on a stakeout that did not involve him. Yes, he had given them an essential clue, but they had this well handled without him. Abe was having the antique shop fumigated against an aggressive termite infection that was damaging items all over the store. (Under his breath, Abe had blamed his arch-enemies, the Berkowitz brothers and then declared that you couldn't trust anyone by the name of Berkowitz.) All of those different events conspired together so that there was no going home for Henry right now, and he was by default out with a delighted Lucas.

Swirling his energy drink, Henry sighed and gulped more before turning his attention to his young assistant on stage singing a rousing song by Green Day. Reluctantly Dr. Morgan admitted that the song was catchy and that Lucas did it well. Henry didn't want to encourage him too much, though. Lucas would become insufferable because the praise usually went to his head.

The happy crowd boisterously sang out the song with him, so Lucas returned to his seat as if he was a victorious hero who slayed the most dangerous song in the history of karaoke. Being gracious and celebratory, he got another one of the energy drinks for Henry.

"Thank you," Morgan said dryly, but Lucas had long ago developed a shell against his understated disapproval.

After Henry had finished the second infernal drink, he started to feel his nerves tingle in ways that were uncomfortably like a 60s drug trip. He was thinking too much about his nerves gyrating that he mumbled a yes at the young man's question before he realized what he'd done.

"Fantastic! What song are you going to sing?"

Focusing across the table, Henry asked, "Excuse me?"

"The song you agreed to sing? What are you going to pick?" Lucas was making small flailing gestures toward the song book.

"You know I don't listen to pop music," Henry said with a pointed look of distaste at the book.

"I'll pick it for you then," he said. Though his head was pointed down, Lucas ordered, "Drink up, doc. You need to keep your voice hydrated."

Henry eye rolled and made a face Lucas couldn't see while the other man swirled his finger around and stabbed at a song title in the book.

"'Across the Universe!' Nice and slow one to get you started. You do know the Beatles, don't you? Or are you more of a Stones man?" he asked with eager interest.

"It matters not," Morgan answered as he leaned forward. He sighed as if it were onerous and then stood up, shaking out the lapels of his jacket before walking to the stage for his turn.

As Henry began to sing the song, he remembered the real John Lennon. He hadn't personally known the man, of course, but he'd been a witness to his murder. It had been an innocuous December night for him then.

He walked the streets often in those days because he couldn't sleep. Abigail was gone. Abe was… gone. That wasn't quite right, of course, and Henry knew it. It was Henry who stayed away in hopes that Abe would live his life without the burden of him like an albatross around his neck. But on that night, Henry hadn't had anyone, and he wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

Unlike Dr. Morgan, John Lennon would never know the pain of resurrection or whatever it was that happened after every time he died. He only got one try at his life, and that made Henry an anomaly all over again. Some decried the unfairness of life. Henry Morgan decried the unfairness of death.

With a heavy head, he got off the stage to polite clapping. The person who bound up after him had a mind for more uproarious music in the vein of Queen's "We Will Rock You." The crowd in the karaoke bar became less polite and more engaged.

Henry at times felt like a living history museum as he was witness to much of the interesting and romanticized parts of it for the last 200 years. The thing about living history was that most of it was just people living their lives the best way they knew how. People hadn't changed all that much over the years. Attitudes about certain things might have changed, but people… they didn't change.

There were other parts about being the living witness that could make his life hard if he wanted to dwell on things. Instead of concentrating on any one thing, though, Henry seemed to be thinking about all of them simultaneously. His mind was on fire while everything else around him had slowed down.

"Nice singing, doc," Lucas praised the distracted Henry.

The tall man had surreptitiously recorded the song to share with Hanson and Martinez later. They wouldn't believe on word alone that Henry would sing karaoke. Then again, they might. Henry had been opening up lately, especially when he was prancing about solving cases with the flair of a Gilbert and Sullivan character.

"Want another energy drink?" Lucas asked. It was less generosity by this point than a desire to get rid of the drinks he realized tasted awful.

Henry took the offered beverage and downed it in one gulp like a frat boy in a drinking contest. He then sat up with a straight back while he tried to focus his wandering mind. He thought he had been seeing vividly before, but his horizons felt more expanded than they had been before.

"I'm afraid I must be going," he said to his companion as he stood and adjusted his scarf around his neck.

"But I thought you said you didn't have a place to go tonight. We can go back to my place," Lucas began before realizing it was unfit for company, especially Henry Morgan's company. "No, maybe not."

Henry leveled him a look that seemed to be both paternal and full of relief. This much closeness between them, such as it was, was enough for now. With a gracious incline of his head, Morgan bid his adieu and walked out the door to disappear into the New York night.

As Henry walked down the street with people surrounding him on all sides, he walked into his history. He usually saw history in the streets, but he could usually set it aside because all people had thoughts like that. Even the truly young reminisced.

Before his eyes the people around him appeared to change. Superimposed above their bodies were images of them as they would have been all through the ages. Maybe it was that damned John Lennon song. As beautiful as it was, it had a dreamy quality that was not attached to this earth. It could hardly be said that nothing was going to change his world. Change was the most reliable constant in his world.

Moving away from Lennon and McCartney, Henry sang to himself the song Lucas had done. The more he walked, the more he hummed it like a musical mantra. It was the kind of song you'd use to walk down the sidewalk and through the crows of people with purpose. In a way, it was like that song from that 70s disco movie with the man in the white suit. Had he known the title of the song, Henry Morgan would have been amused that it had to do with staying alive.

As an immortal man, Henry was not afraid of many of the things that made people fear or the things that _should_ have made people fear if they'd known better. The drugs that were rampant in decades past, such as the 70s or 80s, were nothing new to him. He reset after every death with no more physical damage than that which his first death brought him. Cognitively he was fine, but the stealthy mental scars always returned with him.

Singing to himself, Henry was too alert to try to sleep even if he did have a place to go. He directed his feet to the Dakota, the place he had been on that December day so many deaths ago. Was it odd that he measured his life in deaths? As a medical examiner, maybe that was the best way to measure any life.

"Not contemplating any skinny-dipping again are you?" a mezzo voice asked to the right of him. The sound brought his traveling mind back to focus on her face, but it took a long time to get there.

They played a game of chicken nearly every time they talked with each other. It was a symptom of his personality since Henry Morgan had always enjoyed poking authority figures. It was perhaps a contributing factor that led to his first death. She looked at him as she usually did, and he answered her with his own smirk. It was a joy to play the game with someone else who played well.

"Lieutenant Reece. How nice to see you," he said jovially.

"You can call me Reece. I'm off duty," she answered. "What brings you here? You don't appear to be sleep walking."

"I am perhaps sleep-waking," Henry said in reference to his mental state as. "I have had so many energy drinks that I could not sleep even if I wished to do so."

"That explains why you are fully dressed. It couldn't be that you were actually listening to me, Doctor," she chided.

"And I thought we were both off duty," he said with his smile coming out softly. "So what brings _you_ here, Ms. Reece?"

She stared at the door of the Dakota and was quiet so long he felt she would not answer. When the silence was so pervasive that he thought he should walk away, Reece softly stated, "I was thinking about my uncle."

While Henry would not normally have been interested in many people's personal lives, Reece gave so very few personal glimpses. She was rather the opposite of Lucas who wished to over-share if he could. The difference was enough to make Henry want to engage her in conversation and pull out the hidden details.

"Is it anything you'd like to talk about?"

Reece looked off into the distance quietly. "He's had a stroke. He might not recover."

"My sympathies. Does he live in the Dakota?" Morgan asked as to why Reece was staring so intently at the building.

Shaking her head and bringing her thoughts out of it. "No. He never did, but this place reminds me of him."

Henry's lips twitched. As Jo knew, he was notoriously bad with silence, but he wondered if Reece would tell him her trouble if he just got out of her way.

After more shared silence, she said, "He's the reason I joined law enforcement. My family likes jazz, but he always had a special regard for John Lennon. He was there when he died."

"I remember the night he was killed," Henry said contemplatively. It was an odd coincidence that he had already been thinking of it that night. Perhaps he had even unwittingly seen her uncle.

"How could you? You were just a small child at most," she said, her skeptical and efficient manner coming to the front.

"It's just a phrase, Lieutenant. Someone must have told me about it. I have a very vivid imagination," he said, his eyes softly glowing with the challenge he always gave her to uncover his lies, however reasonable they might sound.

She stepped back, clearly ready to go somewhere else. The indecisiveness in which she put her foot to the sidewalk showed him she wasn't sure where that place would be.

"Do you want to walk to Strawberry Fields?" he asked, giving her his arm as a gentleman would.

"It isn't wise to walk in Central Park in the dark," she said.

"I'm game if you are," he challenged. With a dubious look, she took his arm, and they walked to the memorial in Central Park.

Henry had seen many different versions of Central Park in the many decades he had tried to live in the City. He would go away, but he always came back. There was really no rhyme or reason to it other than New York reminded him of Abigail and it was where they raised their son.

"Tell me more about your uncle," Henry said to Reece when they got to the entrance of Strawberry Fields.

"No, I don't think so," she said, surprising him. "He'll pull through. If he doesn't, I'll tell you about him then."

"Fair enough. I hope we don't have that conversation for a long time," he said kindly, "though I do wish to learn more of you. I find the rare personal glimpses you share fascinating."

He wasn't playing chicken then. He was being honest. Reece behaved as perfectly befitting the needs of her professional role. When she revealed personal details, they were so much more of a treat because of their very rareness.

"Yet you give many people personal glimpses too frequently," she said with a leer at his person.

"Touché," he replied.

"So, Dr. Morgan, where were you before you were here?" she asked.

"This night? I was out with Lucas singing karaoke," he said with an expression that looked like he was smelling something just a little off that you couldn't find even in the morgue.

"I'm sure he enjoyed that," she replied with dripping sarcasm. "What did you sing?"

"'Across the Universe,'" he answered with a raised eyebrow. "Lucas picked it out because it was at the beginning of the book."

Reece gave him a look of assessment. It was a frequent expression she had with him. Henry had the thought that she would be a good chess opponent because she seemed to evaluate things with many plays ahead.

"Is that why you came here?" she asked.

"I couldn't sleep and started walking. Now I am here, and I still can't sleep," he said.

"You're a child, Henry," she declared.

"Excuse me?" he asked with a surprised laugh.

She rolled her shoulders and said, "A small child sometimes needs to be reminded to go to sleep. When he does, he will fall like a broken toy and sleep."

"I assure you that I am much older than a toddler," he said, but it made him think of Abe at that age.

"Go to sleep," Reece ordered.

"Only if you do the same," he said, changing the position of his body to walk out of the park.

She considered it and agreed after a moment. Together they walked out to go to the nearest subway to get trains to their separate destinations. Henry chose to go to his office. If he was going to be awake and away from home, he could at least spend it in a familiar environment.

Henry slept lightly toward the morning, sitting in his chair and putting his scarf under his head as a makeshift pillow. When the workday started, he was in place as he should have been while Lucas was nowhere to be found. He let go of the thought after he was called to the precinct for a debriefing on the Martinez and Hanson's stakeout. The clue he had quite accidentally given them helped wrap up the case in a nice bow.

Lucas, the missing assistant, was already there showing Hanson and Martinez something on his phone. They both seemed rather impressed with it, and Henry wasn't sure what it was until he got closer that it was his voice singing "Across the Universe" the previous night at the karaoke bar.

"You recorded me?" Henry said with affront.

"You sound good, Doc," Hanson declared magnanimously.

Before he could protest, Lieutenant Reece walked up on the small group. "Does he?"

Lucas turned to her proudly and played his recording again. Reece looked at Henry in front of her and then stared at the video Lucas had made. When the video was done playing, she gave a quick nod of satisfaction.

"Nice, Henry. Now, let's go to the meeting room to discuss the case," she said, leading the way and expecting the rest to follow her like ducks.

The four of them fell in step behind her.


End file.
